i do not know what crack smells like.

i do not know what meth smells like.

i do know what pot smells like...

i'm feeling alright. i think.

i have two showings on sunday.

i really honestly don't know what it is, but i know it's not pot.

i caught the neighbour - the same one i'm yelling at - walking around in circles muttering to herself, today. i'm not sure if she knew where she really was; she was obviously very dramatically fucked up. it seemed more meth-like. but, i don't really know.

i don't know what they've been smoking since the first of the month down there, when the checks came in, but it smells like burning plastic.

meth?

crack?

i already went through this.

i really haven't been dealing with that issue for months. i don't know what's brought it back, again. but, it's actually really suffocating. like, if you get a whiff of it, it feels like you inhaled some kind of poison, and you're choking.

i'm still totally straight edge, since the end of may.

and, if i end up moving away from here in mid september or early october, so that future concerts are in toronto, there's a good chance i've smoked my last cigarette. ever.

see, this is the right narrative: we don't have a refugee crisis, so much as we have a broader housing crisis. the 50,000 syrian refugees, plus the 80,000 (documented) border crossers, are just making that fact obvious.

and, again: that might not seem like a lot of people, but it is when you understand that they're competing with our most vulnerable citizens (like me) for already stretched resources.

i can articulate myself relatively well. the other people in my socio-economic category mostly can't. so, you don't hear from them. but, they're there, and they're struggling, and this is making things worse.

we need to get the right story out if we want the right actions taken.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/02/05/refugees-needs-expose-canadas-housing-crisis.html

refugees are expensive.

so, let's put the money down and do it properly, or get out of the refugee business.

so long as we've got a housing crisis, the liberals will have a pr problem.

so long as we've got homeless refugees everywhere, and low income canadians feeling the pressures from it, the government just comes off as incompetent - but the kind of people likely to get galvanized by this are conservatives, anyways. online polling is only ever able to be useful by coincidence, but if you're going to pull anything out of it, that's the message - this is red meat for the rural conservative base, which the conservatives needs to get beyond to win elections.

but, if the liberals can frame the issue as a choice between spending tax money helping people and sending them away - and then actually build the necessary housing - then they're going to win the argument.

we don't imagine that taking in refugees means putting them in dorm rooms and then letting them loose on the free market; if that's what we're doing, we're mismanaging something. we imagine that taking in refugees is a process overseen and planned by a centralized body, and that success means finding them good housing and giving them the resources they need to thrive.

so, the government needs to make a choice: close the borders, or pony up and do it right. canadians will support the expenditure, but we want to see better results.

people in canada would not generally consider immigration to be a ballot question.

but, the low vacancy rate could very well be a liability for the liberals.

personally? there is a 0% chance that i'm going to vote for the conservative party, nor would the conservatives be articulating policies designed to reduce the vacancy rate or create affordable housing and whatnot. they don't actually have an answer to the problem.

traditionally, urban canadians have looked to the ndp to address these concerns, but they aren't doing it.

if the liberals get some shovels in the ground and make a big deal of it, they could take away an issue that the ndp should be all over.

dear kijiji,

gatineau is not in ontario.

thanks,
dtk

i want to catch up on the rebuild by the end of the weekend, and focus on out of town options on monday, so i'm going to get to rebuilding heavily over the next few days.

this was supposed to be the thing that made our immigration system so much better: we didn't open the gates to poor people and tell them to work their way up, we insisted that if you want to come here, you'd have to already have wealth.

as a consequence of the more selective immigration process, we didn't develop slums or ghettoes, and we didn't have the accompanying increases in crime that come attached with widespread poverty.

we also had the resources required to effectively deal with our own poor.

there never was a "canadian dream" - we rejected that as naive, american utopianism.

but, we seem intent on repeating their errors. and, if we do, we will end up with the same consequences.

the actual error that the government is making, the root of the problem, is in thinking that class mobility is not just possible, but easy - and maybe even that some trivial tax adjustments will have some effect on it.

in fact, the actual empirical reality is that there is almost no class mobility at all in this society, and that what class mobility does exist is largely downwards.

what we need at this point in time is for the government to put a bigger emphasis on redistributive policies; increasing the number of poor people is not going to somehow lead to greater class mobility, but just exacerbate the problems around poverty that we already have.

ok.

let me focus on windsor until mid-month at least.

stuff keeps coming up. it's not great. but, it is of course a lot easier to stay than to move.

if the property manager in this building had adjusted her attitude properly, we could have solved this problem without going to court, and i wouldn't have to move at all.

so i'm sending applications to non-smoking buildings, and they're telling me "actually, people smoke here, fuck off", which is the wrong answer - they should be telling me that they're eager to hear from me, and eager to throw the smokers out.

it's that attitude i'm looking for, first and foremost. a property manager can't control everything that happens on the property, but they can commit to standing on the right side of history.

otherwise, what's the point? it's just another smoking building. and, they're going to have a hard time converting a smoking building into a non-smoking building if they just tell the non-smokers that the place is full of smoke...

so, what does it mean to advertise a non-smoking building?

i understand that it may not necessarily mean that the building is completely smoke-free, at this exact time. but, what it should mean is that the landlord is broadcasting that it will aggressively seek to remove smoking tenants when they are disturbing non-smoking tenants.

the point of difficulty seems to be in getting property managers to deal with it. this is no doubt in some way a function of laziness, but it's no doubt a mental block, as well - even if these people don't smoke, because a lot of them are older, and this city is stuck in the past, they have astoundingly out-of-date attitudes towards smoking. they don't think it's a big deal, and they're going to look at the non-smokers as the troublemakers.

but, when you are advertising a non-smoking building, what you should be broadcasting is the opposite: that you will not take the side of smokers, and that you will act aggressively to stand up for the rights of non-smokers.

otherwise, it's just false advertising.